Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

Stomping boots echoed through the outpost, gear jangling downstairs. I went to the command post and found Captain Vrettos hunched over the radio, poncho liner wrapped around his shoulders. His eyes were even more bloodshot than usual.

I asked what was wrong.

“The mukhtar ,” he said, choking out the words. “Dead and gone.”

By the time we got to the Sunni Strip, most of Fat Mukhtar had been scooped into pots and pans for burial. Belly guts hung from a palm tree like red banana clusters. An old woman was trying to dislodge them with a broomstick that didn’t reach. Across the road a pair of wild dogs fought over a tibia bone wrapped in calf muscle.

While Snoop questioned the old woman, I walked around the remnants of the black Mercedes. Both the windshield and the driver’s-side door had been blown apart. What remained looked like a hollowed-out clock, burnt black. The frame of the passenger seat had survived, as had the car’s rear tires, perching its back in the air at an angle.

“This ain’t no part-time job.” It was Dominguez, coming around the other side of the vehicle. “Whoever did this knows the craft. My guess: rocket under the driver seat. Remote-detonated.”

I followed his index finger to the void where the seat and steering wheel were supposed to be. In his own Mercedes, I thought. Which means someone who had access to the mukhtar had put it there. Which means an inside job. Which means… what?

Bowing my head, I forced myself into a moment of reflection for the dead mukhtar . I told myself I hoped he hadn’t suffered, and probably meant it.

I turned to look down the road. The wedged dirt seemed to run straight into the sun. Somewhere down there, at the other end of the Strip, lay Yousef’s falafel shack and, potentially, an answer to Rana’s problems. That’d have to wait, though.

Snoop joined us at the car, the old woman heading to her house to fetch crates for a tall soldier to stand on.

“Happened about forty minutes ago,” Snoop said. “Big boom, woke the whole neighborhood. She say if we got here twenty minutes ago, we could’ve helped get the bigger parts.”

Dominguez laughed, then apologized for laughing.

“Any idea who might’ve done it?” I asked.

“No,” Snoop continued. “But she say the Sahwa guards disappeared during the night. They should be right there, at the intersection.”

So it had been an inside job. Which narrowed it down to… eighty, ninety people? The real question was who’d paid the emplacer, and why. I walked down the dusty yellow Strip and channeled my inner Irish beat cop. If not who or why, I thought, how about where? Ten feet in front of the Mercedes, I took a knee and looked over the area. Remote-detonated meant close, but not too close — no one would be stupid enough to blow up a mukhtar right in front of their own house.

Nothing made sense. I rubbed my eyes, and my nostrils flared. Then I stopped looking in front of me and started looking sideways at things, studying a small constellation of huts north of the Strip, on a crooked hill.

“There.” I pointed. “That’s where I’d do it. Whatcha think, Sergeant?”

Dominguez walked up beside me and squinted his eyes. “Hmm,” he said. Then, “Not bad, Iceberg Slim. Not bad at all.”

I snorted and looked behind us. The victorious dog gnawed on its trophy, having already torn through the meat. Doc Cork was steadying Washington, who was on his tiptoes on stacked crates to knock down the flesh slop from the palm, the old Iraqi woman shouting instructions in Arabic.

This is it, I thought. The Suck.

I left Washington in charge of the bomb site and walked up and around the hillside. A scratchy wind pushed against us. We moved in a diamond, Dominguez in the lead, then Snoop and me, then Doc Cork. Doc Cork was whining about getting stomach bits on him. I asked him to stop.

“Sorry, LT,” he said. “It’s just weird. We were at his place last week, eating falafels with his guards.”

I nodded, wondering where my horror for things like disintegrated men had gone. There was just a nothingness, an acknowledgment of fact. Then Dominguez brought up the possibility of a house-borne IED in one of the huts.

We searched the huts with jaded efficiency. The first two were the same act from the same tired play: no one knew anything, no one had seen anything. They’d learned long ago to stay inside when explosions happened. At the third hut, though, after we’d flipped up mattresses and turned over hampers, the mother pulled aside Snoop. She had a long, narrow mouth and eyes that kept darting to the kitchen window.

“She say to look in the side of her yard,” Snoop said. “She saw the little girl next door throw something this morning. She say her family has nothing to do with it.”

We moved outside to the side yard. In a mound of dry tumbleweed, I glimpsed a black box with a bright white button that ran up it like a skunk stripe. I reached in and pulled out a garage door opener.

“Bingo,” Dominguez said. “The detonator. Think she’s lying?”

I shook my head and pointed to the last hut, a small mud house with red bars on the windows and a flat roof. The five of us surrounded it in a horseshoe, and I knocked on the door.

The door opened in a low groan and Alia stood there, fierce chestnut eyes tucked under a black head scarf, her stout frame blocking the entrance. Snoop’s mouth fell wide open. I said hello.

On the inside, the three-room hut was nicer than those around it; all the furniture, from the kitchen cabinets to the dining table to the dressers, was a matching beech wood. A large flat-screen had been mounted in the main room. Dust sat in corners and under furniture, and clothes and pillows sat in cluttered piles, a far cry from Rana’s pristine home. I smelled old food in the kitchen, spotting withered dishrags. Through it all, an old man in a wheelchair watched from the corner with a glassy stare.

“How’d you afford the television?” I asked.

“My nephew’s,” Alia said. “Bought it for his grandfather with Sahwa pay.”

My soldiers roused the nephew from bed and pushed him into the main room. Sleepy and tense, he shared his aunt’s dumpy build, and a bald patch marked the crown of his head. I tapped at a framed photograph that showed the teenager standing back-to-back with a young girl, their hands formed into finger guns, each striking a James Bond pose. I asked where the little one was.

“School,” Alia said. “Of course.”

I questioned Alia and her nephew separately. She had the day off from work. He’d left his Sahwa post the day prior, and wasn’t due back until the afternoon. Of course she’d heard the explosion. He’d slept through it, but his aunt had woken him up about it. She said the Sahwa guards should’ve been at the Sunni Strip intersection. He said the same. She didn’t know the names of the men on the Sahwa night shift. He said the same. She didn’t know anything about Fat Mukhtar, she was just a cleaning woman. The mukhtar had been his boss’ boss. Though he didn’t know anyone who wanted the man dead, maybe he’d been driving drunk again and that was what had caused the accident?

I told him that seemed unlikely.

“Lots of things happening at night,” Dominguez said. He was looking directly at me, puffing out his cheeks one at a time. “Still.”

I tried to keep my response flat. “Not for long.” Somewhere between the mosque and the cemetery, I’d finally decided to do something about the other part of the platoon. Something.

“What about him?” Dominguez tapped the wheelchair of the old man. He hadn’t moved, nor had the distant look on his face changed. Alia moved to wipe away a pool of spit that’d gathered in the corner of his mouth.